'Locked' BIOS's on Radeon 9x00 boards

[Dave Baumann]

During the AGP8X saga with the 9700 PRO boards one of the things that tipped up is that the BIOS's of 9700 PRO's are not flashable, or at least not by the public.

I think I've now confirmed this to be the case, and the reson being that with the 9700, 9500 PRO and 9500 there are so many variants of the same chip with different configurations they do not want the public to be able to flash, say, and 9700 BIOS to turn it into 9700 PRO, or attempt to enable the extra 4 pipes on a 9500 to make it an 9500 PRO.

[MrB]

not sure who said they aren't flashable but they are.

[Tagrineth]

During the AGP8X saga with the 9700 PRO boards one of the things that tipped up is that the BIOS's of 9700 PRO's are not flashable, or at least not by the public.

I think I've now confirmed this to be the case, and the reson being that with the 9700, 9500 PRO and 9500 there are so many variants of the same chip with different configurations they do not want the public to be able to flash, say, and 9700 BIOS to turn it into 9700 PRO, or attempt to enable the extra 4 pipes on a 9500 to make it an 9500 PRO.

ROFL! :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: 3dfx Voodoo3, anyone? :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[WaltC]

During the AGP8X saga with the 9700 PRO boards one of the things that tipped up is that the BIOS's of 9700 PRO's are not flashable, or at least not by the public.

I think I've now confirmed this to be the case, and the reson being that with the 9700, 9500 PRO and 9500 there are so many variants of the same chip with different configurations they do not want the public to be able to flash, say, and 9700 BIOS to turn it into 9700 PRO, or attempt to enable the extra 4 pipes on a 9500 to make it an 9500 PRO.

One of the things that I found interesting with the new crop of AGP x8 motherboards is that even though the card might be a x4/x8 card, an AGP x8 motherboard will pick it up as an x8 board and lock the bios at AGP x8 (meaning you can't arbitrarily switch modes as was possible with AGP 2.0.)

I'm not sure if this is applicable to all current x8 chipsets, just some of them, or whether this is an artifact of the type of AGP connector/slot a particular motherboard uses (either a Universal, or a straight x4/x8 connector.) There are a fair number of departures in 3.0 compared to 2.0, so the bios "issue" with the 9700 might be related to this. As well, ATI seems fond of "locking" things away from end users but always supplying a "key" to unlock what they've locked (as was true of ATI 3D products and supported resolutions until recently.) Mayhap all that's needed here is the discovery of the "key"...;)

Heck, I can't even dig out of them why they arbitrarily cap WinXP refresh rates (so does nVidia, but in both cases refresh rates are easy to "unlock") so getting at this info may be time consuming.

[Sage]

corporate BASTARDS!!!!!!! how dare they not allow us to turn out 9500s into 9500Pros!!!!!!

hmm i bet there is a way to change the chip ID..... just like Quadro-izing a GeForce :D if someone can find a way to do this, im buying a fewtrickloads of 9500s :P